Donglion returned to existence slowly. He shivered, clutching his body, which pained him. He dreamed of escaping it again, of returning to… But it was still too near to him, the influence too strong, for him to even pretend to think of… Oh! What a burden! To be flesh and blood was bad enough, but being mind and spirit, too! It was unbearable! He could perhaps slash his wrists, but flesh and blood would remain (albeit a little less blood). And even as he carried out this dreadful monologue the matter which made him up was spilling out and becoming one with the universe, so that it would continue to exist as part of something or other all the way through to the end of time, which was just too long to continue on, even if only in some form or another! What horror! What pain!

He fell back down again (having stood up briefly before), weeping uncontrollably into his hands, stinging his bruised face. "I only wish not to be…"

"Wow." Someone chuckled behind him. He felt a soft kick and turned slightly. "Hey, fucktoy, get the fuck up, why don’t you?"

Rising shakily to his feet, Donglion looked and saw her, the blond Sister, whose name he still did not know. Staring past her, he recognized how she, like him, had not existed recently and seeing her acting so nonchalant about it filled him with strength.

She frowned as he unconsciously puffed out his chest. "Alright, got it, yeah, I’m supposed to, like… show you around a little bit. You got that, hotstuff?"

He nodded.

"Groovy." She pulled a device like an electronic whistle from one of her loops, which he now saw were pastel pink. Raising it to her mouth, he found himself surrounded in a cloud of smoke. She giggled. "C’mon, you little bitch."

He hacked and coughed but followed her out of the room. The smoke, which made him think at first of the lack and misery of the factory district and the street music they played to distract themselves from their pain, seemed to calm him slightly and he began to breathe it in on purpose. It was vaguely sweet, the sweetest thing in this whole place, otherwise so dark and foreboding and sour. He began to like this new one, this other Sister.

She leaned against the opposite door, putting her leg up so he could see the strange gridlike pattern on it. The door had a mirroring sigil to the one they had just exited from, white instead of black, and when he shut the door (at her indication) they reflected off each other, so one could see the white in the black, the black in the white. She pointed back and forth between them. "These are, like, ritual rooms. Very sacred places. And powerful. Things that happen here, they tend to get intense pretty quick."

"I might have some idea about that." But he wasn’t so sure anymore.

She didn’t seem bothered by this. "Yeah, right. Especially in the black one. The white one is nicer. It’s the one for good girls. Bad girls go through the black door to be redeemed through blood and sex. And when they’ve been beaten and fucked enough to be good girls they go to the white room to be better girls."

He wanted to ask what this meant, but didn’t want to bother. His leg starting shaking, but in fear or anticipation he knew not.

The Sister gestured vaguely ahead. "Further along, those are dorms. Supplicant dorms and something dorms. You’ll be hanging out in the something dorms, until you supplicate, or if you do some bad stuff and can’t repent. Then, you get to chill out in the basement to be stress relief, y’know?"

He nodded. It was clear now what was expected of him. That he would stay in the dorms and train in the black ritual room until he could supplicate. Then, he would go to the white ritual room to be… He shook his head. Looking down, he realized he hadn’t ever put his dress back on. He hadn’t ever been told to.

She looked at him looking down. "Oh…" She snickered. "Sorry, fuckstick, I forgot you were getting fucked and weren’t wearing your pretty little dress." She wiped snot on her arm. "Anyway, you’ll need proper undergarments and things which we keep, well, somewhere. In the basement, probably."

He wondered why he was bothering to listen to this woman, who was barely capable of intelligent speech. The other one, Jezlam, gone now, was at least his mental and physical superior. Though she was a woman, there was some sense in him following her. This dumb bitch, meanwhile, was destroying herself with toxic vapors while she paraded him around in the nude without either of them noticing.

But, if neither of them noticed…

"Hey." Her glassy eyes turned over to him, her head cocked to one side. "Let’s go now to get all covered up. Modesty, that’s the key idea. You can’t, like, show yourself off."

He looked down at her legs, clearly visible under that strange mesh which her dress, barely reaching her knees, so readily revealed, and scoffed. "What do you know of modesty?"

She laughed again and blew smoke at him. "And I thought I was dumb, huh…"

"Yeah." He found himself blinking rapidly. His snappy bravado somehow turned to mute acceptance. "Yeah…"

"Good little bitch." She walked off through the hallway, Donglion following close behind. As they exited the smoke, he again felt his streams of thought beginning to flow, but it seemed something had gone wrong, like the streams now crossed and got turned around and so on. Why this did not bother him more he could not fathom. He did not want to think about what would happen if he tried to remember something in detail, how memories might blend into other memories and make something entirely different from what he had experienced to begin with.

She looked back at him as she pulled a cord, illuminating at the end of the hall a flimsy wooden staircase. Seeing him upset, she muttered, almost to herself, "Chill out. It’s not really that important," and made her way down.

Donglion, too tired of asking questions, stuck close behind her.

Ahead of them sat a large metal machine, radiating heat, with a pile of black rocks nearby and a shovel. Behind it was an uncut stone wall. The floor was littered with a fine dust.

To either side of them were wood-paneled dividers. From the left one, Donglion could hear an irregular dripping sound. Looking over, he thought he caught a man’s eyes, but the blond Sister pulled him off to the right before he could really tell. "Don’t bother her, girl," she said.

"I’m not a girl," Donglion answered.

She snickered. "You’re funny. Now c’mon, let’s get you dressed up."

His strength still sapped, she pushed him through into the other area. There were a number of dressers and large chests set against the back wall, with a small desk and a mirror in the one corner. Walking further in, Donglion noticed a large set of shelves by the divider wall, loaded with various liquids and powders and even a few things seemingly edible.

For the first time in what seemed a thousand years, he noticed himself in the mirror. His face was bruised and bloodied, his expression limp and lifeless, dead to the world. His eyes were dim and his hair matted and grisly. Dust and grime coated his body, particularly around his crotch, which was still sticky with his and Jezlam’s fluids. That accursed dress, fit for neither man nor woman, had even taught him to slump.

He wanted to kill that man in the mirror, that beast, just to put it out of its misery. No, that was not him in the mirror. It couldn’t be. He would remember having seen someone or something, for this is what he had seen. This something was himself in no sense, because it was made of different molecules than he had previously been made of, and its organization of these molecules ultimately differed radically insofar as this was taken up in a social context. And as for continuity, surely a brief period of non-existence was the most radical break one could have. No, whatever this thing was, it was not him. He was the one remembering having seen it. Or, rather, the one who would remember it, after the thing was taken out of here and became him again.

Turning around, he saw the blond Sister saunter through the doorway. She was easily two heads shorter than him. A lightweight on all fronts. She would not be able to beat him as Jezlam did. Not this disgusting waste of space.

"What’s stopping me from beating you half to death and running the fuck out of here?" he sneered, dredging up all the violence inside him.

"You’re funny," she repeated, pulling out her little smoke whistle again.

But he reached out and snatched it out of her hands. She looked up, startled. He pulled back, snapping the chain that held it to her dress. She made a little whimper.

"Let’s see how you like the taste of your own medicine!" he shouted, inhaling deeply and blowing out, only to just blow spittle on the machine. Confused, he stared at it and shook it around a bit, blew again, but nothing happened.

She giggled. "You really are funny, sir. Like, the way you don’t understand things. You don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know anything. You just haven’t accepted it yet. That’s why you suffer."

Dumbfounded, he let her grab the device back. She pressed down on the device, inhaled and blew out a little puffy cloud of joy.

His determination melted.

She smiled. "Fun, isn’t it?"

He nodded.

"Y’know, I worked really hard to have these banned once." She rotated the device around with her hand, inspecting it.

"What?" He didn’t care.

"It was so dumb. I thought they shortened your lifespan, distracted you from reality, made you weak and ignorant and lazy… But who was I to judge, really?" She took another hit, this time inhaling fully before breathing out. "Just some bitch with an attitude problem. That’s what He taught me."

She gave a little giggle, before snorting and laughing uncontrollably. Donglion snickered along, until both of them started hacking and coughing. He spat up a kind of pink snot on himself, making his skin tingle.

She chuckled again, tears rolling down her face, eyes totally bloodshot. "Oh, man," she chortled, "There’s your fucking brain, dude."

"What?" He was very worried now.

"Yeah, that’s your fucking brain! You just spat it up onto your fucking chest. Oh, fuck. I mean, how are you gonna think your way outta this one?"

"I… I…" He began to hyperventilate. Whenever he tried to take a deep breath, he just took in more of the delicious smoke, which just seemed to intensify his animalistic panic at having lost his brain.

"You really are funny, dude." She slipped the device into a hidden pocket. "C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up."

"What?" What was this demon saying to him? Was she even real?

"I forgot that I need to clean you up first, before we can get you dressed and everything. Heh, dumb bitch." She started rummaging around in the drawers. "You go on ahead. I’ll bring you up a set of things. Make-up and everything. Get you real pretty and cute and, like, oh my gosh I just can’t wait for it, you’ll love it, I promise."

Existence was sin. The only redemption was non-existence. What could he do to save himself in a miserable world where his molecules just kept on flowing through this great unholy monstrosity? He collapsed to the ground.

"Just go back up the stairs. Third door on the right. Big water droplet sigil. You can’t miss it." She had gathered a few things up on top of the dresser.

Donglion just shook violently until he didn’t anymore.